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Cisco Call Manager 9.0 and 9.1 in VirtualBox Guide

As mentioned, I can confirm that Cisco Call Manager 9 (CCM9 ) does work in VirtualBox and can be installed in a similar manner to CCM7. I have had both 9.0.1 and 9.1.1 have been installed with all services running perfectly.

As we did with CCM7, CCM9 must first be installed in VMware and then moved over to VirtualBox. CCM9 is now 100% supported in VMware, so the install process should be flawless. Keep in mind though that VirtualBox is definitely not officially supported, so you will get no help from TAC. This should only be used in a lab environment.

The minimum requirements for CCM9 are the same as they were in CCM7, 1x 80GB SCSI disk with 2048MB RAM. The CUC prerequisites have changed slightly and if you use 80GB/2048MB you won’t be able to install CUC. I haven’t been bothered to find the minimum requirements for CUC but I’ll post them up when I get some time.

I’ve used VMware Workstation 8.0, but you should be able to use any version of VMware to build the initial machine. All we need to do is to have the install complete and boot successfully, all other finer details can be changed once we move over to VirtualBox.

Start by creating a new VM and choose a custom config.

Depending on your version of VMware this may change, but I used Workstation 8.0 as the hardware platform.

We don’t want to use the auto deployment scripts and we will need to modify the hardware before boot, so just choose the ISO later.

Any version of Red Hat should work here, but I used 64-bit version of Enterprise 6.

Name it appropriately.

One processor is enough but if you’ve got more resources to throw at it, you may be able to do it here as long as you match the same in VirtualBox later.

Same goes for the RAM. The minimum requirements call for 2048MB but if you’ve got more, chuck it in.

I hate using NAT, but it’s probably useful for labs. In any case I’ve got bridged here, but we will redo this step later in the VBox config.

Make sure you use SCSI here. I haven’t tried SAS but it may work too.

Create a new HDD.

Make sure this is set to SCSI, it won’t work with IDE here.

I’ve got the minimum as 80GB here, but if you’ve got more throw it here.

This is where the vmdk is stored, make sure you take note of the location as we will need this file later to import into VBox.

Finish it up.

Edit your VM before powering it on, we’ve got a few things to do here.

Select the CD/DVD drive and browse for your ISO.

Select your ISO.

I’ve finished up here, but if you want you can remove the floppy, sound cards etc.

Power on the VMWare image.

The install process here is exactly the same as a typical CCM9 install, I’ve included it just for the sake of doing so.

We need to not add a new hard drive here (we will be reusing the one built by VMware).

Just accept this.

We need to edit our VM before powering it on.

Remove the SATA controller, if you remember we built the VM in VMware using SCSI disks.

Add a SCSI controller.

Select Choose Existing Disk.

Browse to the vmdk file that was outputted by VMware.

Your disk setup should now look like this.

Choose the IDE CDROM drive to boot from the CentOS live boot disk. Note that you can boot of any live distro, I actually used the Ubuntu 12.04 live CD because I was having issues with remote key forwarding to the VM whilst using CentOS.

Again, I hate NAT’ed NIC’s so I switched mine to bridged.

Mount your CCM partition and chroot to it.

vi/nano/whatever the hardware_check.sh script in /usr/local/bin/base_scripts/ which is similar to what we did in CCM7.

Find the function check_deployment() as shown below.

Like we did for CCM7 edit out the isDeploymentValidForHardware function.

Make sure you save the file, I used vi to edit this so :wq! it.

Throw the following lines in to change the hardware type to match those by VMware.

Now you’re ready to fire up CCM9 in VirtualBox so just run that thang.

On bootup you should be able to see the OS detecting all your hardware as VMware devices – this is a good thing, don’t worry.

If you receive some weird output, don’t worry too much, the important thing is that the OS boots and services start successfully.

Again, ignore any of these types of errors, this is why this shouldn’t be used in production.

Login, hooray!

Because the hardware has been modified slightly, the OS is unable to detect the vCPU and the amount of RAM.

However, everything still works perfectly 😉

Just a few notes about the install. In the CCM7 install I did before, I added a new user whilst chroot’ed over to the CCM partition so we could SSH in later to modify the check_deployment() script. I only attempted a few times, but every time I tried my SSH user couldn’t log in. All permissions were set correctly, the user was added to the OS properly but SSH wouldn’t work. I’m sure if I dug deeper I would probably find some sort of SSH permission script in Cisco’s funky land, but for the purposes of getting CCM9 into VirtualBox it wasn’t needed.

I’ll be posting some more info on the topic as I use this more. Also, due to CCM9’s new licensing model I *may* look at loading licenses on to get this running past the 60 day limitation.

To eliminate the errors show in step 64, you can either add a serial (COM) port to the VM (step 55), or disable the program using it in /etc/inittab after step 60 (while still chrooted using the live cd).

The “Init SD0” error message is the kernel telling you that it can’t start a program because the serial port it listens to doesn’t exist.